Radioshop Pickups

Six years ago, two ex-schoolteachers with a mutual love for great guitar tone went into business building pickups with a few twists that are uniquely their own…

- David Mead

This issue, we’re off to Caerphilly in Wales to meet Paul Dunn and Paul Best, the two-man team behind Radioshop Pickups, purveyors of toneful single coil and humbucker upgrades that are brimming with vintage chic. In honour of our visit, the pair constructed a Telecaster pickup from the ground up, beginning with loading the magnet slugs into a bobbin, winding the age-appropriate wire and finishing with a wax dip, affixing the metal bottom plate and soldering the wires into place. Some day soon that very pickup is going to be dropped into a Telecaster and hopefully transform the instrument and thus delight its owner with a newborn vintage snarl and twang so reminiscent of yesteryear’s perceived golden age.

Fielding any confusion surrounding the pair both having the same forename, we elected to resort to already established nicknames: Paul Best is hereby dubbed ‘Besty’ and Paul Dunn ‘Dunny’. Formerly schoolteachers – Besty languages and Dunny chemistry – we wondered how they were drawn into the world of winding pickups in the first place.

“We’ve been guitarists for a very long time, since our teens,” Besty begins, “and my route into pickup making – for me, personally – was that I became aware, in the early 2000s, that this was the way to really improve a guitar. I was a pickup customer; I was buying a lot of them. Slowly that became, ‘Could I make my own pickups?’ Six years ago we started trading, but we’ve been experimenting with pickups for a lot longer.”